Tibet

Tragedy on the roof of the world

Will the Dalai Lama make a deal with China?

THE way plenty of hardliners in Beijing see it, the solution to the “Tibet question” is to let the 63-year-old Dalai Lama die. The search for his reincarnated successor would then probably be held under the auspices of the (atheist) Chinese Communist Party. Even if it were not, no Tibetan could ever match the authority of the present Dalai Lama, who alone holds a fractious exiled community together and who still commands enormous, if surreptitious, reverence inside Tibet. With the Dalai Lama out of the way, the task of turning Tibet into just another Chinese province would be made immeasurably easier.

Throughout the 1990s the hardliners have, except in the matter of the Dalai Lama's demise, had their way. He has been relentlessly attacked in the Communist press. Monasteries inside Tibet have had to submit to rigorous political surveillance. Over 600 Tibetans, many of them young monks and nuns, sit in jail for “political” crimes. Political campaigns have even been taken down to the grassroots. Some 95% of peasants and herders in the Lhokha region, which the official Tibet Daily describes as the “Dalai Lama's manor”, have apparently undergone “patriotic education”. Hardliners wish all the distinctiveness of Tibetan culture and religion to be squashed. Tibet's (ethnic-Chinese) party secretary, the much-loathed Chen Kuiyuan, insists that “Buddhism is a foreign culture”, and that equating Tibetan national culture with Tibetan religion is “utterly absurd”.

Many Tibetans wonder what will soon be left of either. The central government is pouring in billions of yuan to develop the Tibetan economy. A wave of migration by ethnic Chinese has been encouraged, so much that where there was not a single one in Tibet five decades ago, today half the population of Lhasa, the capital, is Chinese. Development has benefited plenty of Tibetans, including an emergent middle class. But Chinese usually get the juiciest plums. There is a sense among the 2.4m Tibetans that they are turning into second-class citizens in their own land.

In recent weeks, however, signs of a softer line have been seen in Beijing. They first showed during President Bill Clinton's state visit to China in June. Then, Jiang Zemin, China's president, said he was prepared to meet the Dalai Lama—providing he acknowledged Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and (a new condition) over Taiwan. The promise was reiterated in August when the vice-chairman of the Tibetan People's Congress told Antje Vollmer, the deputy speaker of Germany's Bundestag, that the “the door remains open” to the Dalai Lama. Tibetans in exile confirm that the Chinese government has established informal contact for the first time in years.

Plenty of those who care about Tibet assume any softer stance from China to be insincere. Yet a more liberal view prevailed in Beijing in the 1980s. Today there are good reasons for China to seek an accommodation with the Dalai Lama. Tibet pins down an expensive garrison of over 200,000 Chinese troops. Turmoil in Tibet sets a dangerous example to other restive minorities in the Chinese empire, such as those in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

Above all, harsh attempts to stamp out Tibetan nationalism have patently failed. Indeed, they may have encouraged it. The Tibet Information Network in London recently reported that ten prisoners died after nationalist protests in May at Lhasa's main jail. The protests seem to have been encouraged by an expected visit from a European Union delegation.

The Dalai Lama himself is not going to reject Chinese advances out of hand. Indeed, he has indefinitely postponed a planned visit to Taiwan in order not to rile the Chinese. He has even shown mild signs of distancing himself from the least-compromising exiled Tibetans, who want an independent Tibet encompassing ethnic-Tibetan regions of China.

The Dalai Lama is presumably aware, if such a thing is possible for a reincarnated leader, of his own mortality. After his death the chances of a Tibetan settlement will be much diminished. Attempts to take the Tibet question to the court of international opinion have won hollow victories. They may have promoted Tibetan independence as a fashionable Hollywood cause, but China has not yielded. Indeed, they have probably encouraged the hardliners.

With the Dalai Lama facing the cultural destruction of his land, he may seek an accommodation with the Chinese that allows him to return to Tibet in exchange for something that falls far short of full autonomy. Yet in the exiles' camps, more and more Tibetans are advocating, indeed turning to, violence in search of much bolder goals. He will first have to distance himself from these people, and when he does the cards will still all be in China's hand.